Headcase explores themes of mental health,
mental illness, and the experience of mental health care services by members of
the LGBTQ community. The editors state, “We initially conceptualized Headcase in 2014 as a curated collection
of personal pieces including essays, poems, illustrations, and photographs by
writers and artists both established and new.” (p. xxviii) They further decided
to include a broad array of patient, provider, social, racial, and ethnic
perspectives to “present a broader, more in depth, and balanced conversation.”
(p. xxviii)

Schroeder
and Theophano divide their anthology into five topical sections: (1)
conversations about health and illness, (2) stories of survival, (3) encounters
of a mad kind, (4) pushing boundaries, and (5) the poetics of mental health and
wellness. Among pieces in the first section, Arlene Istar Lev’s “Queer
Affirmative Therapy” (p. 12) introduces a concept that appears repeatedly
throughout the book. Unlike traditional conversion therapy, which tries to
“cure” gay persons, or even the more neutral DSM V approaches, queer affirmative
therapy not only accepts LGBTQ identities, but considers them normal healthy
variants. Fidelindo Lim’s and Donald Brown’s more personal essay, “Sa Kanyan
Saring Mga Salita” (p. 38), explores the gay experience in Filipino culture.
Among the sad stories in section two, Chana Williams tells the tale of her
mother’s lobotomy as a treatment for depression and lesbian relationships.
Lobotomy also appears in “Fix Me Please, I’m Gay” (section three, p. 169),
where psychologist Guy Albert discusses the era of conversion therapy.
In addition
to essays, the conversation in Headcase
includes poems, artwork (see, for example, Gabrielle Jordan Stein’s “This Work
Is About Digested Socks,” p. 156), a suite of black-and-white images), a series
of glyphs, and even a graphic story about J.R. Sullivan Voss’ attempts to fit into
society as a trans-man, “Sisyphus (Or: Rocks Fall and Everyone Dies.” (p. 88)
In the final section, Guy Glass presents an excerpt of his play, “Doctor
Anonymous,” about the 1972 American Psychiatric Association meeting in which a
closeted gay psychiatrist wearing a mask
asserted the normality of gay identity. (p. 260) To contemporary
viewers, the most shocking revelation in the play is the fact that at that time
homosexuality was considered a mental disorder and conversion therapy was a
standard practice.

In Melbourne, Australia, Hector and Aisha are hosting a big barbecue for their families and friends who come with several children. Hector’s somewhat controlling Greek parents appear too, bringing along too much food and their chronic disapproval of his non-Greek wife despite the two healthy grandkids and her success as a veterinarian. Aisha’s less-well-off friends, Rosie and Gary, arrive with their cherubic-looking son, Hugo, who at age three, is still breastfed and being raised according to a hippie parenting style that manages to be both sheltering and permissive. Hugo has a meltdown over a cricket game, which the older kids have let him join. He raises a bat to strike another child, when Hector’s cousin, Harry, intervenes to protect his own son. Hugo kicks Harry who slaps him. Rosie and Gary call it child abuse and notify the police.

The aftermath of the slap is told in several fulsome chapters, each devoted to a different individual’s perspective: among them, Hector, Aisha, Harry, Rosie, Hector’s father, and the teenaged babysitter Connie. Harry is rendered miserable by Rosie and Gary’s aggressive lawsuit against him. Connie believes she is in love with a philandering, substance-abusing Hector who in turn has unscrupulously led her on. Recognizing its alienation of her friends, Rosie sticks to her legal pursuit of Harry although she worries about the drain on their meagre finances, the exposure of Gary's drinking, and the anticipated criticism of their parenting style. Aisha is fed up with her husband’s edginess and submission to his parents, and she flirts with escape in the form of a handsome stranger at a conference.

Kate Walbert’s recent book, His Favorites, is a compact 149 page novella that seems to be a
direct outgrowth of the #MeToo movement, a work consciously addressed to women who
have experienced sexual abuse from those in power over
them. But linking the book to current events does an injustice to the artistry
of this exquisitely constructed work. Ms. Walbert embeds her story of sexual
exploitation in adolescence and focuses on a teenager who is abused by her popular
English teacher in a prestigious boarding school.

Jo Hadley’s story begins
abruptly. To outward appearances, she is a typical adolescent more concerned
with how she looks, having a good time, and hanging out with friends than
reading the Great Books. Suddenly, while driving a golf cart around the course
on a lazy summer night, a close friend is violently thrown over side, strikes a
tree head first, and dies instantaneously.Only later do we learn about the profound
impact this accident has had on Joy and her family.Joy is forced to transfer out of her neighborhood public school and
enroll in the Hawthorne School. But Joy is clearly talented, adapts quickly to
her new circumstances, and is placed in a special writing program for gifted
students. There she falls under the tutelage of a charismatic 34-year old
teacher, called Master. He has a reputation for running an irreverent, highly
charged classroom and is always trailed by a legion of admiring young women
from his advanced writing class.

Jo’s horrific s encounter with Master in his
residential suite is followed by a failed effort to report Master’s behavior to
the school leadership. We learn about Jo’s parents and the disintegration of
her family after the accident. We meet her schoolmates. One is an attractive
member of Master’s retinue who resurfaces several years after graduation in New
York and who still seethes with resentment at her treatment by Master. A second
classmate is musically gifted but far less stylish than the students in
Master’s English seminar. She becomes the target of a cruel hazing prank that
reverberates in Joy’s mind with the passage of time. As the book reaches its
conclusion, the context in which Joy is relating her story is unexpectedly revealed,
which casts all of her recollections in an entirely new light. The storyline is disjointed and the vantage point shifts
frequently. But the narrative is gripping and novella’s structure is
exquisitely built on apt description and poignant allusions to other works in
the literary canon including the novel A
Separate Peace by John Knowles and The
Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe.

Geoffrey
West sounds like the perfect dinner guest. He has lived a fascinating life and
his professional persona has evolved over time from theoretical physicist to
global scientist. He is a distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute and
is one of those rare people who knows something interesting and worthwhile about
just about everything.

In Scale, West examines networks that provide the basis for complex systems: biological systems like the human circulatory system, coastal ecosystems, and man-made systems like urban communities and global corporations. He identifies three defining features shared by each. First, the networks serve the entire system and fill the entire space that is available. Second the terminal units in the networks share common design features and are essentially the same, whether they are the capillaries that provide nutrients and oxygen to peripheral tissues or the electrical outlets that enable access to the grid for home appliances.First, the networks serve the entire system and fill the entire space that is
available. Second the terminal units in the networks share
common design features and are essentially the same, whether they are the
capillaries that provide nutrients and oxygen to peripheral tissues or the
electrical outlets that enable access to the grid for home appliances. Finally,
there is a natural selection process at work that is constantly optimizing the
network function. West emphasizes that these defining features of complex
systems are present in biological systems like the human circulatory system,
coastal ecosystems, and man-made systems like urban communities and global
corporations.
These common features enable West to
identify fairly simple mathematical formulas that predict the relationship
between changes in size and efficiency of complex systems. In general, in
biological systems size and energy consumption are scaled sublinearly, i.e.,
metabolic rate does not increase to the same extent as size. The limits to
growth occur because of the increased demands for maintenance of the system.
What makes Scale an innovative work
is West’s effort to apply the scaling laws derived from observations in nature to
man-made complex systems such as cities and companies. He identifies two
distinct components in these human systems, the materials that constitute the
infrastructure and the creative work that is produced. West then demonstrates
that while the physical demands of these complex human systems, such as roads,
electricity, and water supply, which mirror the metabolic requirements of
biological systems, increase
sublinearly, the productive output like
wages, theaters, and patent activity, which have no parallel in non-human
biological systems, increase supralinearly. Moreover, this inventive works requires
a proportionately increasing input of resources as size increases. West tries
to draw lessons about the rational limits to growth by extrapolating from the
scaling laws that underlie biological complex systems to the two components of
the artificial systems created by mankind. West cautions against blind reliance
on “big data” alone to solve the pressing social problems confronting mankind.
Instead, he advocates for delineation of underlying mathematical principles to
guide the analysis of the growth of cities and companies and rational future
planning.

In this volume
by the esteemed nurse-poet/writer, Cortney Davis, are 43 previously
published poems (some revised for this collection), assembled in 3
sections-- the middle section featuring her long poem, "Becoming the
Patient," that recounts through 10 shorter poems her time "in the
hospital."

The poems in the surrounding sections describe in beautiful and
intimate detail her patients' lives and the call to and practice of nursing.
Featured throughout are battles won and lost-- with disease, with the medical
staff, and as the title-- taking
care of time--
suggests, the finitude we all face. No matter the difficulties of hospital
life-- whether as practitioner or patient-- its familiarity provides
grounding and comfort in these poems as, for example, heard through
the speaker of "First Night at the Cheap Hotel" who tells us:

"Being here is like being sick in a hospital wardwithout the lovely,
muffling glove of illness.In hospital, I would be drowsy, drugged into a
calmthat accepts the metal door's clang,the heavy footfall right outside my
door.All these, proof of life,and there would be a nurse too, holding my
wrist,counting and nodding, only a silhouette in the dark" (p.67)

And if
sometimes the experiences and images become too hard to bear, the skillful
nurse-poet can, as Cortney Davis does in "On-Call: Splenectomy,"
"tame them on page” (p.52).

Andrew Solomon’s 2012 book Far From the Treeis a study of families with children who are different in all sorts of ways from their parents and siblings to degrees that altered and even threatened family functions and relationships. Years after its publication, director Rachel Dretzin collaborated with Solomon to produce this documentary based on his book. At the time of filming, the children were already adults or were well into their teens. The film looks at how the families came to accept these children and how they sought—with varying success—happiness.

The documentary focuses on five family scenarios: homosexuality (Solomon’s own story); Down syndrome; dwarfism; murder; and autism. Anyone in these families or anyone who knew these families would never invoke the familiar idiom “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” when talking about these children. These apples fell far from the tree, and Solomon builds on that twist to the idiom to characterize the relationship between the affected children and their families as “horizontal.” By extension, Solomon characterizes the relationship of children who are not different from their parents and siblings in any appreciable manner as “vertical.” Only one of the original characters from the book appears in the documentary; the other families are newly “cast.” The film captures the lives of these families with all their challenges and successes, and intercuts footage from home videos the families provided. Dretzin also filmed interviews with parents and in some cases their children. The footage and interviews show how families evolved in their acceptance of their children and their situations as best they could. The best was still heartbreak for some, but real happiness was achieved for others.

In this remarkable anthology, 51 women and men describe
their nursing school experiences, from initial fears and anxieties to
increasing confidence and appreciation of the profession. Jeanne Bryner, in her Introduction, explains
how she and Cortney Davis deliberately sought a diverse group of nurse-writers,
from recent nursing graduates in their twenties to seasoned veterans in their
nineties. Their collection includes
different races, nationalities, social and economic classes, and education
levels. What the contributors have in
common besides being nurses is that they are gifted writers able to capture in
poetry or prose the transforming moments of their lives.
Nursing students reading this anthology will recognize many
kindred souls, struggling with the same uncertainties and apprehensions,
wondering how they will ever accomplish all this, but also gaining command of
the profession, relishing its special rewards, valuing patients as their
ultimate teachers. All readers will understand what is so special about nursing
.

Citing numerous studies that might be surprising to both lay and professional readers, Dr. Rakel makes a compelling case for the efficacy of empathic, compassionate, connective behavior in medical care. Words, touch, body language, and open-ended questions are some of the ways caregivers communicate compassion, and they have been shown repeatedly to make significant differences in the rate of healing. The first half of the book develops the implications of these claims; the second half offers instruction and insight about how physicians and other caregivers can cultivate practices of compassion that make them better at what they do.

This is an important
contribution that analyzes, critiques, and aims to correct structural
inequalities (racism, sexism, capitalism) that influence contemporary medicine,
with particular attention to the technical influences of computers, “big data,”
and underlying values of neoliberalism, such as individualism, exceptionalism, capacity,
and progress through innovation.

Introduction:
Theorizing Communicative BiocapitalismBanner writes,
“biocapitalism is comprised by the new economies and industries that generate
value out of parts of human bodies” (p. 12). Parts include DNA, ova, and
organs, but there’s also data from medical care, where patients are reduced to
their physical bodies and/or to their “digital status” in medical records,
research, even personal information volunteered on the Web, all which is indicated
by the term “communicative.” As an example, Banner cites the large realm of patient on-line
groups that are exploited by large companies as free labor, thus reducing the
voice of the patients. Approaches of narrative medicine and medical humanities have
not dealt with digital health, market forces, and the implied power
relationships. Perhaps the new subfield of health humanities has promise to do
so, if not also captive to “the logic of the market” (p. 17).

Ch. 1. Structural Racism and Practices of Reading in
the Medical Humanities
Banner writes,
“Medical racism is a product of structural and institutional racism” (p. 25). She
finds that current approaches from interpretive reading are insufficient
because “the field’s whiteness has contoured its hermeneutics” (p. 25). Instead
of the “reading-for-empathy” model, we should read for structures of racism,
sexism, privilege, as well as economic and political inequality. She
illustrates such reading with texts by Junot Dìaz, Audre Lourde, and Anatole
Broyard.

Ch. 2. The Voice of the Patient in Communicative
Biocapitalism
Patients have
flocked to networking websites, voluntarily posting much personal information. Banner
analyzes how technocapitalists mine these sites for data to use or sell.
Patients’ information, given voluntarily, amounts to free labor and, even,
work-arounds for companies that avoid expensive double-blind controlled
studies. Rhetoric for these sites speak misleadingly of the “patient voice,” “stakeholder,”
or “story sharing” and hide the exploitation involved. The chapter is specific
for websites, drugs, and drug companies.
Banner discusses
(1) the “feminized labor” involved with sites for fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue
syndrome (both “contested diagnoses”) and (2), more abstractly, the
medicalization of the clinical gaze on patients who participate in websites and
yearn for “an imagined state of purity,” and/or “an ableist vision of norms and
reparative medicine” (p. 61). Overall, the digitalized-patient voice is
colonized by forces of whiteness and should be decolonized. She discusses writing
by Octavia Butler and Linda Hogan, both women of color.

Ch. 3. Capacity and the Productive Subject of
Digital Health
This fascinating
chapter describes and critiques “digital self-tracking,” or the use of devices
such as Fit-Bits that help create and maintain the so-called “Quantified Self”
(or “QS”). Banner finds this fad within the tradition of the Enlightenment (Ben
Franklin) so that “exact science” may “optimize” individuals by being “responsibilitized”
in a “self-sovereign” way. QS users understand that “Everything is data” (p. 83).
She argues that this trend emphasizes “masculine objectivity” while “disavowing
debility” (p. 85). Collected data may contribute to a “worried well” status or
conditions of “precarity” or “misfitting.” She writes, “QS practice remains an
inscription of the self as a self-surveillor, engaged in masculinized practices
of neoliberal self-management” (p. 91). She discusses the technologies of the
devices Scanadu, Melon, and Scarab. She provides and interprets photos of visual
arts representations by Laurie Frick, who is a “self-tracker.”

Ch. 4. Algorithms, the Attention Economy, and the
Breast Cancer Narrative
Banner discusses
Google Analytics, later Alphabet, which includes Calico and Verily, which have
partnered with pharmaceutical companies. Such combinations of algorithms,
capitalism, and media aim to capture the public’s attention, especially online.
Messaging about breast cancer becomes reductive, emphasizing medical solutions,
not prevention, and it avoids discussion of causes such as environmental
pollution. Some critics decry “pinkification” of breast cancer. Public stories,
such as Angelina Jolie’s, emphasize individual empowerment, a “hegemonic
construction of illness”’ (p. 112), and these are amplified by mass media, both
print and electronic. More diverse messages would value “heterophily over
homophily” (p.121).

Ch. 5. Against the Empathy Hypothesis
Drawing on
several commentators, Banner critiques the notion of empathy as a goal for
caregivers as condescending to the patient and suspect when allied with
productivity and efficiency for institutions. Further, the notion of “resilience”
(in a “bleed” of neoliberal rhetoric into health humanities) has been misused
in applied literature, parallel to notions of self-help and self-management.
Some hermeneutics still support values of “state and capitalism” and ignore
writers of color. Banner discusses the work of African-American poet Claudia
Rankine, some of whose work is “postlyric,” and J. M. W. Turner’s painting “The
Slave Ship” that illustrates “necropolitics.”

ConclusionThroughout the
book Banner illustrates reading “for structure” in her interpretation of texts
and visual images but also in medical institutions and practices and, still
further, in the enormous and pervasive world of government forms and programs,
big data, computers, and beyond. She finds structures of capitalism, sexism,
and neoliberalism within existing “heteropatriarchal, ableist, and racist
frameworks” (p. 154) despite claims of neutrality. She urges medicine and the
humanities to develop new methods. She mentions specific collectives and
communities that now challenge such norms (such as Gynepunk and CureTogether), and she calls for thinkers in many
disciplines to confront demeaning technology and to “engender spaces in which
care is more just, and more humane” (p. 156).

The
Strand Magazine is a source for “unpublished works by literary masters.” The
October-February (2017-2018) issue includes a Raymond Chandler short story that
has never before been published. Chandler wrote crime fiction for the most
part, and the stories usually involved the fictional detective Phillip Marlowe.
This story, however, written between 1956 and 1958, centered on how American
health care fails people who need it when they can’t pay for it or look like
they can’t pay for it.

In
this story, a man who has been hit by a truck is brought into the emergency
department at “General Hospital.” He arrives just before shift change and so
the admitting clerk is already annoyed. The clerk checks the patient’s pockets
for the required $50 deposit and finds nothing, so she could now send the
patient to the county hospital, and that would be that. But, before she
initiates the transfer, she asks a passing private attending physician to look
at the patient. He sees that the patient is dirty, smells of alcohol, and would
cost a lot to work up. Mindful of an admonition from a major donor that the
“hospital is not run for charity,” the physician surmises the patient is “just
drunk,” and agrees the patient should be moved to the county hospital. So off
the patient goes.

The
next day, the same admitting clerk at General Hospital gets a call from the
county hospital. She’s informed that the patient they transferred had a head
injury requiring surgery, and that the patient had $4,000 in a money belt inside his undershirt. The
patient couldn’t be saved, however, because of the delay involved in the
transfer to the county hospital. It’s all right—he only died.